Sunday, August 08, 2010

Dyed man walking

Want to know what the NYT's Sunday offlede looked like in the earlies? The gunmen had "long died-red beards."

It'll be interesting to see whether the Times corrects an error in the jump hed (9A in the national edn* on sale in the nether bowels of the Denver airport):

10 Aid Workers From The West Are Slain in Afghanistan

Well, not if you believe the second graf, which gives you a total of eight Westerners in the group: six Americans, a Briton and a German. As the third graf says, 10 people (of 12 total) were killed. The fourth leg of the jump notes that two of the four Afghans were among the dead.

The Times almost certainly isn't stacking the deck, or trying to gin up a war with Iran to make the publisher's friends happy; it's just adding 2 and 2 and getting 22 (Western aid party + 10 killed = 10 Westerners killed). A reminder of how easy it is to put your feet wrong, even with the resources and firepower that the Times can still muster.